Look, it's me! 20071004

Well, not really. It was just a way of grabbing your attention. But maybe in the future I could upload pictures where I appear so that you could see them. Ahhh, what am I talking about? I’ll explain…

You most probably are reading this with your favorite feed reader, which is something I have nothing against (or I wouldn’t provide a feed). But obviously that won’t reveal you a link which is well above these lines and says pictures!

In other words, I finally managed to finish the first version of my little photogallery!! (now imagine people clapping and saying yes yes!). It’s quite drafty yet but I have lots of ideas in mind, one of these is providing a feed (which is something that the old reincarnation hadn’t).

Some little details about it, for my dear curious like a cat friends:

Its name (clyk) is a mix of the Spanish word for click, which is clic but with a touch of Icelandic, that is, replacing i’s with y’s and c’s with k’s. And there you have!

I began building it with rails and script.aculo.us, but then I learnt more about rails and script.aculo.us and decided to redo it, this time using jquery. Then I wasn’t satisfied with the general clunkiness of browser interfaces, and did another attempt at building it with ruby+cocoa, another one with cocoa only, where I began to realise that I was tying up myself to cocoa and objective C and I want my stuff to be portable and usable across different platforms, so then I gave up and went on holidays.

After those holidays came a couple more of months working on several different projects. Then I went on miniholidays again and had some time for putting in place all the ideas and thoughts that had been developing secretly in my mind. And there came the rebuilding of this site from rails to php. Yes, I went from rails to php and the reasons are sound and reasonable:

First, one can’t run a rails application in a shared host without having to keep an eye on the server constantly to make sure it’s still up and running. It has a very high probability of being slashed by the process killer -which makes sure that nobody’s processes eat up the whole cpu, and that’s good and bad at the same time. Good because that makes sure your hosting will always be responsive, but bad because RMagick (the software used for handling images in ruby) is a hungry memory eater. There was no way I could upload and resize a simple picture without having my rails process killed instantly. A solution for this is to get a better hosting plan, with a dedicated server or one of those accelerators or slices. That would make sense if I made a living of this website, but that’s not the case.

Second, I absolutely hate the application server way of deploying applications which is required in rails. Although mongrel is great, one of the reasons why I moved as far away as possible from java, Tomcat and company was that I liked the immediateness of php, and that’s something one loses when deploying rails apps.

Third, these aren’t good times for doing rails stuff unless you dedicate your full time to it. With the new rails 2.0 version approaching and all the changes that have been going on it, what you do today is outdated tomorrow. I personally prefer to do something and keep it current tomorrow while I’m making a new song, if you know what I mean. This should be recreation, not obligation.